| Commerical site rebuild or upgrade?
e-commerce site re-design |
Novus
msg:4223322 | 12:04 pm on Oct 28, 2010 (gmt 0) |
Hi folks
It’s been a while since I visited these forums but I have found myself faced with a dilemma.
I have recently been recruited to manage a music distributor’s website, the site is poorly built and the cms has very little in terms of functionality which is severely hindering its visibility in the major search engines. (Can’t create landing pages, can’t add a sitemap, URL’s need re-writing, can’t edit most Meta tags etc.)
I am in the process of putting together a document detailing all the changes needed to rectify this.
I’m expecting to be recommending a complete rebuild rather than an add this add that upgrade. I would think the cost of these additions would justify a new build but you never know. However I don’t think I’ll be able to get financial clearance to get site rebuilt till next year.
But... as usual I need to get things moving in the meantime in terms of increasing visibility and traffic.
Firstly, what are people thoughts on totally rebuilding a commercial site? It has a reasonable page rank but generally doesn’t perform well in the SERP’s (Meta tags & content badly written) has around 500 backlinks.
Secondly, does anyone have any opinions on how I should start getting some of these (newer) pages indexed? 350 out of 1900 so far. (For example were running a campaign on Mr Men products, I only have 1 Mr Men page indexed!
I had thought about removing the badly witten meta descriptions and letting google decide, at least that way the might be unique "if" the page got indexed. (for example every dvd product has an almost identical description to the dvd catagory page.)
Any thoughts?
Thanks
Neil
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httpwebwitch
msg:4224053 | 8:45 pm on Oct 29, 2010 (gmt 0) |
Whether to rebuild is a decision you can only make if you know the effort vs. potential payoff.
Generally I prefer not to rebuild things if I can avoid it. However if the site is tied down to a crappy CMS, there may be no choice.
imHo the easiest way to get pages indexed is to provide bots with a well-formed XML sitemap. Rewriting the duplicate content is a good idea too.
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